The Black Hand

by Stephan Talty

  Those who’d spent time in the gloomy Pozzuoli prison and met Cascio Ferro recalled that he often spoke of the detective from New York. “In my entire life,” he told them, “I have only killed one person. Petrosino was a courageous enemy; he did not deserve a dirty death at the hands of just any hired killer.” This slippery-worded “confession,” like every part of the Petrosino assassination story, has been argued and re-argued for decades. Cascio Ferro never came out directly and said he was the triggerman in the Piazza Marina, and, as many argue, it could be a case of wanting to take credit for something he didn’t actually do.

  The capo would never see freedom again. Though he requested clemency, he was kept in prison past the nine years of his sentence. In the summer of 1943, as Allied forces swept across Sicily after the launch of Operation Husky, the Italian defenses in the area of the prison crumbled, and the authorities evacuated the cells before the American bombers could reach it. Vito Cascio Ferro was an old man by this time, and his great fame had long since been forgotten. Somehow, in the rush to flee the prison, the guards forgot about the elderly prisoner and Cascio Ferro was left behind. Abandoned, the sole prisoner of Pozzuoli, he died in his cell of thirst, “like the villain in some old serial story.”

  …

  As for Petrosino’s legacy, it’s difficult to locate. There’s a park in lower Manhattan called Petrosino Square, not too far from the streets of Little Italy the detective once walked, a Little Italy that has largely evaporated and given way to a polyglot neighborhood beyond the detective’s wildest imaginings. The park’s name is somewhat ironic: it was originally called Kenmare Square, after Kenmare Street, itself named by Big Tim Sullivan after the town in County Kerry where his mother was born. The Irish arrived in New York too late to name many places; the square was what was left to them after the Dutch and English had given names to the important things. So the park received an Irish name, and then the Italian name of Petrosino followed, on land that was claimed by a tribe of Manhattoes when the Dutch ships of Henry Hudson sailed into the bay in 1609.

  There’s a small Petrosino museum in Padula, his birthplace, run by a relative. There’s a grandnephew who, inspired by the detective, worked as a Brooklyn district attorney for many years, and his son, who now serves as a cop in Queens. But little else that you can see or touch. Petrosino lived at a time of racing terror and alienation for his people in America, and stories about what he’d done on the street were told and retold in the minutes and hours afterward by barbers and housewives and young girls who were under the threat of death themselves. No statue or plaque can re-create that electric, almost unbearable atmosphere of their lives or tell what Petrosino meant to his fellow Italian Americans in the dark days of 1908.

  What remained after his death were the people he fought for, fought against, moved, and bewildered. He was the most American of all of them, and yet he died in a style that was quite Italian and even traditional. Perhaps the way life was lived in the small villages of Sicily and the way it was lived in America turned out to be so incompatible that a person had to be found to act out the violence of the passage from x to y, and Petrosino became that man.

  He certainly changed the way Italians were seen in America. At the time of his assassination, the beginning of World War I, with its spasm of anti-Italian sentiment and its new restrictions on Italian immigration, was five years away. The executions of Sacco and Vanzetti were nearly twenty years in the future. The hatred of Italians didn’t come to an end in 1909, but Petrosino’s death had established a precedent that was widely recognized and understood.

  On the day of the detective’s funeral, the anonymous reporter from Hearst’s New York American watched the cortege pass on its way to Queens. He spent some time observing the crowds—perhaps he even spoke to a few of the mourners—before returning to the newspaper’s office to write his story, the same kind of story that every editor in New York had assigned to his reporters. His turned out to be the clearest on the larger meaning of what had happened in Palermo. “Men live and die, and New York seems not to care,” the journalist wrote.

  But a day comes when a man dies under circumstances so striking and dramatic that the brooding soul of the city is touched and its distracted attention riveted . . . Then it matters not that the man was lowly born and not high placed, the spirit of the world’s great democratic city rises up, collected and intent, to do him honor. Who shall say—in the presence of this august demonstration—that the foreign-born men who have poured into the gates of the city are not at home here? The Italian citizens of New York entered yesterday into a new sense of fellowship in the all-embracing household of the civic life.

  Acknowledgments

  Many thanks to Anthony Giacchino, whose deep research into Petrosino’s life made this a better book. To Susan Burke, for her gracious cooperation in this project. To Vince Petrosino and his daughter Courteney for their invaluable and generous help with the family’s history. To Andrew Eisenmann for his generosity and sharp eye. To Bruce Nichols and Ben Hyman at HMH for improving its prose. And to Scott Waxman, who saw where the road led.

  A Note on Sources

  The Petrosino family kept a large collection of newspaper clippings, articles, family documents, and condolence letters that arrived after the detective’s death. This is referred to throughout the notes as the Petrosino archive. The newspaper clippings often don’t include any reference to the papers they came from or the dates when they were published. I’m grateful to Susan Burke and Anthony Giacchino for allowing me access to the archive. “Comito confession” refers to the statements given by Antonio Comito to the Secret Service after his arrest, which are now kept at the Herbert Hoover Presidential Library and Museum, as part of the Lawrence Richey Papers, 1900–1957, in the folder “Black Hand Confession, 1910.” The quoted material is from the document “Comito’s Confession,” a 109-page typescript of his original statements.

  Notes

  PROLOGUE: “A GREAT AND CONSUMING TERROR”

  On the afternoon of September 21: For the kidnapping of Willie Labarbera, see the Brooklyn Eagle, October 9 and October 10, 1906.

  “that fiendish”: Washington Post, June 28, 1914.

  “a record of crime”: Frank Marshall White, “How the United States Fosters the Black Hand,” Outlook, October 30, 1909.

  “From the bottom”: Pittsburgh Post, September 4, 1904.

  “Your son is among us”: Quoted in the New York Times, December 15, 1906.

  “There was a popular belief”: Wayne Moquin, A Documentary History of the Italian-Americans (New York: Praeger, 1974), p. 169.

  that it was a myth: This was a running theme with the ambassador, Baron Edmondo Mayor des Planches, in his public statements on the Society. See, for example, “Is the Black Hand a Myth or a Terrible Reality?” New York Times, March 3, 1907, in which Mayor des Planches is quoted as saying, “A few men . . . spread the Black Hand story as a means of playing upon the fears of their victims.”

  “Its sole existence”: Frances J. Oppenheimer, “The Truth About the Black Hand” pamphlet, National Liberal Immigration League, January 7, 1909, p. 2, quoting Dr. G. E. Di Palma Castiglione, head of the Labor Information Center for Italians in New York.

  which some described as: For gray eyes, see the New York Times, March 14, 1909. For black eyes, see the New York Sun, February 12, 1908: “a big, strapping man with flashing coal-black eyes and a melodious voice.” Arthur Train also refers to “the occasional flash from his black eyes” in his book Courts and Criminals (New York: McKinlay, Stone & Mackenzie, 1912), p. 109.

  “muscles like steel cords”: New York Tribune, March 13, 1909.

  “could make a fiddle talk”: Undated clipping, New York Sun, Petrosino newspaper archive.

  “the greatest Italian detective”: New York Times, April 30, 1905.

  the “Italian Sherlock Holmes”: Giorgio Bertellini, Italy in Early American Cinema: Race, Landscape, and the Picturesque (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2
009), p. 342. An Italian publisher printed a novelized version of Petrosino’s life called Giuseppe Petrosino: Il Sherlock Holmes d’Italia.

  “a career as thrilling”: New York Tribune, March 14, 1909.

  adept with disguises: See the Evening World, April 29, 1927: “He disguised himself as a hod carrier; he pushed an organ and led a monkey. He would black boots on a ferryboat or drive a truck.” See also Edward Radin, “Detective in a Derby Hat,” New York Times, March 12, 1944; and Arrigo Pettaco, Joe Petrosino (New York: Macmillan, 1974), p. 40.

  possessed a photographic memory: See Pettaco, Joe Petrosino, p. 127: “Petrosino boasted he could recognize 3,000 Italians on sight.” See also the New York World, March 13, 1909: “He knew by sight every Italian and Anarchist lawbreaker in the East.” And see chapter 2 for the incident in which Petrosino recognized the murderer Sineni four years after glimpsing his photo in a Chicago police circular.

  He hummed operettas: New York Tribune, March 14, 1909: “Joseph Petrosino would be the perfect model of the jolly friar . . . he hummed snatches of opera.”

  his customary black suit: Pettaco, Joe Petrosino, p. 40. Photographs of Petrosino in plainclothes show him dressed in dark suits and a black derby hat.

  “nearly crazed with grief”: Unattributed clipping, Petrosino newspaper archive.

  He had a vast network: Pettaco, Joe Petrosino, p. 60, among other sources.

  This man had heard: Brooklyn Eagle, October 10, 1906.

  (two cents for the unsterilized): Paul Collins, The Murder of the Century (New York: Crown, 2011), p. 3.

  men patrolled: See the case of Giovanni Laberry, New York Tribune, July 9, 1905. Tenement landlord Salvatore Spinella was also reported in various newspaper articles to be patrolling in front of his buildings with a loaded shotgun (see chapter 6).

  “society of darkness”: Pittsburgh Post, March 26, 1907.

  “nervous prostration”: Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 31, 1906.

  “Conditions here intolerable”: Austin Statesman, September 30, 1908.

  was said to be: Cincinnati Enquirer, February 5, 1906.

  an expensive gold watch: Interview with Susan Burke. The watch is still in the possession of the Petrosino family.

  “The Italian has a natural love”: “Petrosini [sic], Detective and Sociologist,”New York Times, December 30, 1906.

  “vampires”: Chicago Daily Tribune, January 1, 1908.

  “could not by any stretch”: H. P. Lovecraft to Frank Belknap, March 21, 1924, quoted in Maurice Levy, Lovecraft: A Study in the Fantastic (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1988), p. 28.

  it was his habit: New York Evening World, April 29, 1927: “When worried by a big problem or wearied, he went home and played the Di Provenza from Traviata on his violin, incessantly.”

  1. “THIS CAPITAL OF HALF A WORLD”

  On January 5, 1855: Michael L. Kurtz, “Organized Crime in Louisiana History: Myth and Reality,” Louisiana History: The Journal of the Louisiana Historical Association 24, no. 4 (Autumn 1983): 355–76.

  His father, Prospero: For Petrosino’s family history, see Pettaco, Joe Petrosino, pp. 34–37; and Ercole Joseph Gaudioso, “The Detective in the Derby,” documents of the Order of the Sons of Italy, https://www.osia.org/documents/Giuseppe_Petrosino.pdf.

  “He never smiled”: Arthur Train, who knew Petrosino, writes in Courts and Criminals, p. 109, that he “rarely” smiled. Radin, “Detective in a Derby Hat,” also says that “he rarely smiled and almost never laughed aloud.”

  In 1888 a series: The illustration ran in the New Orleans Mascot. It can be viewed at http://ecflabs.org/lab/borders/regarding-italian-population.

  At one flashpoint: Paul Moses, An Unlikely Union: The Love-Hate Story of New York’s Irish and Italians (New York: New York University Press, 2015), p. 44. The anecdote is recounted by Dr. Rafaele Asselta.

  Young Joe Petrosino: New York Herald, July 5, 1914.

  “Petrosino was a big”: For Anthony Marria’s memories of Petrosino, see the New York World, March 14, 1909.

  “Shine your shoes?”: For a fictional portrayal, see Horatio Alger, Tom Turner’s Legacy (New York: A. L. Burt, 1902), p. 196.

  required to shine: Richard Zacks, Island of Vice: Theodore Roosevelt’s Quest to Clean Up Sin-Loving New York (New York: Anchor, 2012), p. 54.

  “He was irresponsible”: Interview with Vincent Petrosino, December 22, 2014.

  “He was bent”: Ibid.

  “Pazienza does not involve”: Richard Gambino, Blood of My Blood: The Dilemma of the Italian-Americans (New York: Doubleday, 1974), p. 120.

  One day Anthony and Joseph: New York World, March 14, 1909.

  He tried a succession: The list of Petrosino’s early jobs comes from A. R. Parkhurst Jr., “The Perils of Petrosino,” part 1 of a five-part series in the Washington Post, July–August 1914.

  He even toured the country: New York Herald, July 5, 1914; New York Tribune, March 14, 1909.

  “I am so well known”: M. R. Werner, Tammany Hall (New York: Doubleday, 1928), p. 361.

  One day, wanting to impress: Moses, An Unlikely Union, p. 119.

  “Japanese real estate”: David Goeway, Crash Out: The True Tale of a Hell’s Kitchen Kid and the Bloodiest Escape in Sing Sing History (New York: Crown, 2006), p. 30.

  The 150,000 horses: Eric Morris, “From Horse Power to Horsepower” (master’s thesis, UCLA, 2006).

  “most magnificent”: Maury Klein, The Life and Legend of Jay Gould (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), p. 318.

  Electric light began to replace: Mike Dash, Satan’s Circus: Murder, Vice, Police Corruption, and New York’s Trial of the Century (New York: Crown, 2007), p. 24.

  “Wall Street supplied the country”: Ibid., p. 26.

  (“this capital of half a world”): William McAdoo, Guarding a Great City (New York: Harpers, 1906), p. 350.

  “The outline of the city”: Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams: An Autobiography (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1918), p. 499.

  “Why don’t you join?”: New York Times, March 14, 1909.

  “insults and obscenities”: Pettaco, Joe Petrosino, p. 38.

  “The government is a huge”: Henner Hess, Mafia and Mafiosi: The Structure of Power (Lexington, Mass.: Saxon House, 1970), p. 27.

  Even the church: Ibid., p. 26.

  He “was contadino-born”: Gambino, Blood of My Blood, p. 260.

  “Parsley will make”: Pettaco, Joe Petrosino, p. 38.

  His first arrest: New York Times, April 16, 1894.

  As he strode along: For the Farraday incident, see the New York Times, April 11, 1909.

  “The Tenderloin Negro”: Quoted in Thomas Reppetto and James Lardner, NYPD: A City and Its Police (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), p. 141.

  Abruzzese, Neapolitan, Sicilian: Anna Maria Corradini, Joe Petrosino: 20th Century Hero (Palermo: Provincia Regionale di Palermo, 2009), p. 25.

  veteran cops often gave: Arthur Carey, Memoirs of a Murder Man (New York: Doubleday, 1930), p. 6.

  “Every hand . . . was turned”: Parkhurst, “The Perils of Petrosino,” part 5.

  2. HUNTER OF MEN

  “the one golden chance”: Quoted in Sylvia Morris, Edith Kermit Roosevelt: Portrait of a First Lady (New York: Random House, 2009), p. 153.

  “No man ever helped”: Jacob August Riis, The Making of an American (New York: Macmillan, 1901), p. 328.

  “Sing, heavenly muse”: Quoted in Zacks, Island of Vice, p. 79.

  “He didn’t know”: New York Times, March 14, 1909.

  His dizzying array: For references to some of the disguises he used, see Pettaco, J oe Petrosino, p. 40.

  “It was one of”: New York Tribune, March 14, 1909.

  “He is a master”: Pettaco, J oe Petrosino, p. 41.

  “in his hat”: “Why Petrosino Gets a New Office,” New York Tribune, October 4, 1905.

  One evening: The anecdote is from “Caught After Four Years,” New York Times, August 17, 1903.

/>   “resurrection insurance”: Frank Marshall White, “New York’s Secret Police,” Harper’s Weekly, March 9, 1907.

  He uncovered a scheme: Gaudioso, “The Detective in the Derby,” p. 8.

  Petrosino won seventeen: White, “New York’s Secret Police.”

  Petrosino became so famous: The story comes from John Dickie, Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia (New York: Palgrave, 2004), p. 172.

  “Petrosino seemed to epitomize”: Humbert Nelli, The Business of Crime: Italians and Syndicate Crime in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 95.

  The young Italian was drinking: Many of the details of the Carbone case come from the trial transcript, records of the New York Court of General Sessions, 1883–1927, microfilm, Lloyd Sealey Library, New York.

  “I didn’t kill him”: Pettaco, Joe Petrosino, p. 43. (Pettaco refers to the prisoner as “Carboni,” but court records give his name as “Carbone.”)

  Finding nothing: For Petrosino’s travels on the Carbone case and his arrest of Ceramello, see ibid., p. 44.

  “BALTIMORE—ALLESANDRO CIAROMELLO”: Unattributed clipping, Petrosino newspaper archive; spelling as in the source.

  “Be at ease”: Ibid.

  Carbone never fully enjoyed: Moses, An Unlikely Union, p. 126.

  “In every crime”: “The Italian White Hand Society: Studies, Actions and Results,” pamphlet, Petrosino archive.

  “Petrosino was no”: New York Evening World, April 29, 1927.

  “the most thrilling evening”: The anecdote is from Train, Courts and Criminals, p. 108.

  “A big, strapping man”: New York Sun, February 12, 1908.